"3 Matches" acrylic on board 8"x10"

Smoke & Other Indications

Jimmy played with matches. It started when he was eleven. He found them in the dugout: GOAT MATCHES printed in gold above a creature with the white-bearded head and front legs of a goat and a serpent's scaly green body. Red horns spiraled ornately. Cloven hooves straddled a tilting globe patterned with lines of latitude and longitude, continents abstractly drawn. When Jimmy picked up the box to inspect the creature more closely, he could hear the wooden matches shift inside.

That night, Jimmy couldn't sleep. The full moon through the curtains illuminated too much. He carefully opened the window. The air smelled like a freshly extinguished campfire. Brushfires had been burning throughout the inland hills and even the cool coastal air was touched with smoke. Jimmy moved slowly. The slightest sound would send his mother running to his brother's room, wild with hope that he’d returned. But the bed was always empty. Jimmy knew it always would be. He sat at his desk and removed three matchsticks. He lined them up, each one equally capable of destruction, salvation, or stasis.

Snap of ignition.     Light.     Heat.     Wavering.     Extinction.

Jimmy watched the finger of smoke rise and dissipate, then set the spent match down. Twisted and blackened, it looked like a dark bone from some small animal — a salamander, Jimmy thought, or a bird.

When he finally slept, Jimmy dreamt smoldering hillsides. In the ashy landscape, enormous burned matchsticks sent tremendous columns of smoke into a striking blue sky. Then, at the top of a ridge, something moved. Jimmy turned to see the goat-serpent wrapped around one of the matches, white head and red horns brilliant against the blackened wood. With galloping hooves and slithering body, it quickly ascended, reaching the top and becoming the smoke that drifted into blue and vanished.